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BOOK REVIEW
| Daniel Reynaud, Celluloid Anzacs: The Great War through Australian Cinema, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2007. pp. vi + 279. $34.95 paper.
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| The story of the Great War as related to generations of Australians has largely been told by historians. From the days of C.E.W. Bean's seminal Official History through to the works of contemporary academics such as Bill Gammage and inspired amateurs like Les Carlyon, the legendary theatres of Gallipoli, the Middle East and Northern France have provided historians with ample scope not merely to describe and interpret these events but to celebrate them as expressions of the national character. In this way, they continually pump fresh vigour into a national myth that retains its grip on the imagination of many Australians. One might almost say that the subject has been done to death, except that each passing month seems to reveal yet another hefty tome investigating some 'neglected' military personage, battle, skirmish or long-forgotten controversy. |
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Can there be anything new left to say about the war that is still called 'Great'? Well, yes, especially in the area of film and television which, as Daniel Reynaud asserts at the beginning of this new study, Celluloid Anzacs, has been 'arguably the most significant single factor in the transmission of the Anzac story', and 'one of the key factors in shaping and popularising the Anzac legend'. Reynaud is not exaggerating when he proclaims 'the greater memorability of images over text', though it might hurt those of us engaged in literary and historical studies to admit it. Few Australians, I would suggest, would have ever heard of C.E.W. Bean, let alone read his massive multivolume history which did so much to sculpt, in literary form, the heroic image of the Australian warrior. But most of us (of a certain age at least) have a clear picture of the character played by a fresh-faced Mel Gibson darting up and down those rocky cliffs in Peter Weir's memorable Gallipoli, avoiding the Turkish bullets while futilely trying to prevent his mate meeting his doom on the heights about the famous little beach. Of course, it might be argued that literary texts have provided the film and television industries with their inspiration – to name just two examples, C.J. Dennis's wildly popular verse-narrative The Moods of Ginger Mick (1916) was turned into Raymond Longford's Ginger Mick (1920) and A.B. Facey's A Fortunate Life published in 1981, the subject of a mini-series in 1986. Bill Gammage, whose compilation of Great War memories The Broken Years (1974) became a landmark text in the modern revival of interest in the Great War, himself worked as an advisor on Weir's Gallipoli. |
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One of the themes of Reynaud's critically concise if not especially challenging survey of the popular image of the Anzac over time has been the cultural squabble over 'ownership', as it were, of the legend's defining characteristics. From the beginning, the Digger's DNA has been marked by antitheses – the oppositional cultural inheritances of bushman/urban larrikin; the competing virtues of loyal imperialist/radical nationalist. Only his superior virtuosity in battle was a matter of consensus. There is little doubt that the Anzac story has ultimately made a comfortable fit with the exploitation and propagation of conservative ideology; John Howard was its ultimate political champion. Making a momentous rhetorical gesture of apology to the stolen generation in parliament in February 2008, his successor Brendan Nelson could not get through his speech without dutifully making reference to it. |
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But 'left-wingers' like Gammage and Weir also find the mythology impossibly beguiling. As Reynaud himself admits, the 'evolution' of the Anzac legend in cinema over time has not been a dramatic process, but rather the consistent evocation of an heroic and nationalistic interpretation of the war. The Digger has survived feminism, multiculturalism, historical revisionism and postmodern cynicism. The Digger has even survived film – on the evidence of this account, Anzac cinema, if it can be so-called, doesn't amount to a great deal other than its value as a record of cultural feeling and taste. Reynaud's survey ends with the television mini-series The Private War of Lucinda Smith (1990), a 'subversive' treatment of the war whose protagonist is an Australian chorus girl who goes to German New Guinea just before the outbreak of hostilities. The production pokes some mild satirical fun at the military pretensions and dopiness of the Australian soldiers who capture Rabaul. As Reynaud explains, however, the gung-ho feminism of the series was somewhat compromised by its frequent images of the heroine in topless mode. Perhaps that was enough to placate the wounded sensibilities of the series' male audience. All has been rather quiet on the Great War movie front in recent times, with interest shifting towards the Second (and historically more consequential) war, as ageing baby boomers remember the battles fought by their parents. But a new Anzac blockbuster can't be too far away. |
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| Monash University |
ROBIN GERSTER | |
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